国家审计改革提高了地方国有企业全要素生产率吗?

Can National Audit Reform Benefit Local State-Owned Enterprises'TFP?

本文以2015年末的审计管理体制改革为观察点,以省级以下地方国有A股上市公司为研究对象,从全要素生产率的视角实证检验本次审计改革的效果。研究发现,审计改革提高了试点地区地方国有企业的全要素生产率;提高企业全要素生产率的机制包括规范政府干预和降低企业代理成本。进一步研究表明,“一步到位”的改革模式比“分步实施”模式更加有效;当“掠夺之手”占主导及企业的内部治理水平较差时,审计改革对地方国有企业全要素生产率的提升效果更突出。

The production inefficiencies of local state-owned enterprises(SOEs)have been criticized for a long time.How to improve the production efficiency of local SOEs has always been the focus of SOEs'reform.As an important part of the country's external monitoring mechanism,local auditing institutions hold an big responsibility to supervise the operation of local SOEs.Therefore,the supervision efficiency of local audit institutions is directly related to the performance of local SOEs.It is necessary to consider the important role of national audit in the process of promoting SOEs'performance.Based on this logic,this paper explores whether the reform of national audit system started at the end of 2015 can help strengthen the supervision function of local audit institutions and thus help improve the productivity of local SOEs.Before the reform of national audit system,the local audit institutions in China are under the leadership of both audit institution of higher level and the local government of the same level.This means that local audit institutions cannot get rid of the intervention of local governments.What is more,the income of local SOEs belongs to the local government and it is inevitable that the local government has a strong incentive to interfere in the national audit of local state-owned enterprises conducted by the local audit institutions.Therefore,it is difficult for local audit institutions to perform national audit fully and independently in the areas related to the interests of local governments.Even if problems are discovered,the local audit institutions still dared not speak.To improve the supervision efficiency of local audit institutions,the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the General Office of the State Council in China issued a series of documents at the end of 2015,and opened the prelude to audit reform.The audit reform takes seven provinces and cities as pilots,such as Jiangsu,Zhejiang,Shandong,Guangdong,Chongqing,Guizhou and Yunnan,to explore management system reform of local audit institutions.This audit reform puts the appointment and dismissal of leading cadres,the staff allocation,the budget preparation and approval,audit project plans and so on of the local audit institutions,under the leadership of higher-level administrative departments,which is intended to reduce the dependence of local audit institutions on the local governments,and improve the local audit institutions supervision efficiency.To explore whether this audit reform can help improve the supervision efficiency of local audit institutions and finally benefit to the productivity of local SOEs,this paper examines the impact of audit reform on total factor productivity(TFP)of local SOEs using the difference-in-difference method.We find that audit reform can help improve the TFP of local SOEs.Moreover,the intermediary effect test shows that audit reform can improve the TFP of local SOEs by reducing government intervention and alleviating the principal-agent problem.In further research,this paper finds that the“one-step”reform is more effective than“distributed implementation”reform,and the impact of audit reform on the productivity of local SOEs is more significant in companies with more serious government intervention and more serious agency problems.The possible contributions of this article are as follows:First,in the practical sense,this article affirmed the policy effects of audit reform,showing that national audit,as an external supervision system,has an important impact on the productivity improvement of state-owned enterprises,providing a reference for subsequent system design and policy implementation.Second,in the theoretical sense,this article enriches and expands the research on the role of national audit governance and the efficiency improvement of local state-owned enterprises.The existing literature focuses on exploring the efficiency governance of state-owned enterprises by the National Audit Office,and the literature on the role of local audit institutions is still relatively rare.Although Wang Chenglong et al.(2018)used this audit reform to test the impact of local audit institutions on local SOEs'tax burdens,they did not comprehensively examine whether local audit institutions can help enterprises improve efficiency as a whole.This article helps expand the research perspective.